Subject: re : words that are their own opposites

in february , anna morpurgo davies ( morpurgo @ vax . ox . ac . uk ) mentioned lepschy and gave 3 references ; i wish to mention one further one : lepschy , guilio ( 1982 ) . linguistic historiography . in david crystal ( ed . ) linguistic controversies : essays in linguistic theory and practice in honour of f . r . palmer . london : edwards arnold . in discussing carl abel 's _ gegensinn der urworte _ ( 1884 ) and related work lepschy writes : " his [ i . e . , abel 's ] theory on the importance and interest of words with opposite meanings ( which were , he suggested , particularly frequent in the early stages of languages ) finds its place in a long tradition of studies , from the stoic 's grammar and the etymologies _ e contrario _ [ . . . ] , to the chapter in arab linguistic tradition devoted to the [ . . . ] contraries , or words of opposite meanings [ . . . ] to the medieval jewish grammarians ' discussions on parallel phenomena in hebrew [ . . . ] to christian biblical scholars who at least since the 17th century examine cases of ' enantiosemy ' in the sacred , classical , and modern languages , commenting on words like hebrew _ berekh _ ' he blessed ' and ' he cursed ' , greek _ argo 's _ 's wift ' and 's low ' , latin _ altus _ ' high ' and 'd eep ' [ . . . ] nearer to abel , in the first part of the 19th century , we find the german romantics meditating on opposite meanings [ . . . ] and it is impossible not to remember hegel 's comments on a key term in his logic , _ aufheben _ , which means both ' to eliminate ' and ' to preserve ' , illustrating a coexistence in language of opposite meanings which has great speculative import . " lepschy also writes that abel 's ideas " were taken seriously by people of the calibre of pott , steinthal , and schuchardt " , and that freud repeatedly quoted abel 's work , viewing it " as a linguistic confirmation " of his own theory that " for the unconscious , opposites are equivalent to each other . " ( pp . 28-29 ) surprisingly broad historically , i thought . in this chapter lepschy bemoans the more general lack of a comprehensive historiography of linguistics . - jane edwards ( edwards @ cogsci . berkeley . edu )
